Tuesday, May 30, 2017

The Mermite

Facebook is just plain stupid.  They'll put up a picture and ask if you know what this is.  The latest outrage is this picture.


That's a mermite container.  I have no idea where they got the name, but it was ubiquitous in field in field units.  That's where you got your hot chow, usually from a field kitchen, set p at the battalion trains.

Have I ever eaten a meal from one?  My Gawd, thousands.  When the evening log-pack showed up with mermites on board, you knew that you were getting hot chow.  I've eaten on the hood of jeeps, later, Humvees, and occasionally on the front slope of a tank.

Yeah, I know what a mermite looks like.

6 comments:

Old NFO said...

LOL, I cannot imagine... And I'm wondering if it's a bastardization of Marmite, the French word for cooking pot?

JimB said...

Do I know what it is?? Oh Yeah.. I know and thousands of others do too.

Flugelman said...

Funny that that just came up. Had friends over last Sunday and the discussion turned to foods that we couldn't eat. Mine was GREEN liver from a mermite can on the range at Ft Hood, circa 1960.

BobF said...

That HAD to have been posted by a snowflake. Yep, me too; not easy to forget 'em.

mostly cajun said...

First sergeant used to hunt us down in the woods in Hohenfels to bring us a 'hot' breakfast. Something about scrambled eggs in a mermite that always turned them a delightful green. didn't matter. Ate 'em anyway.

Robert said...

No mermites for us Navy types, just moldy cardboard boxes. We played war once at sea and I ate cold canned spaghetti that was older than me. I was 20-something. The cigarettes crumbled into dust. Good times.